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Using MS Teams for Teaching and Learning

Using MS Teams for Teaching and Learning

Microsoft Teams is available to all registered University of Aberdeen staff and students.

Teams is not a substitute for the University VLEs – MyAberdeen (including the web conferencing tool Blackboard Collaborate Ultra), MyMBChB, and MyBDS. These VLEs remain the University platforms for resources, materials, assignments, and communication within programmes and courses for teaching and learning. In addition, Teams does not offer a robust system for marking or originality checking so must not be used for written summative assessment.

Blackboard Collaborate Ultra is the University’s recommended virtual classroom tool as its tools have been designed specifically to meet the needs of education, and it is available in any course and organisation area of MyAberdeen for online seminars, tutorials, meetings, presentations or group working.

Microsoft Teams is the University’s recommended tool to support collaboration as it enables teams to collaborate on documents in real-time, meet and chat, and seamlessly integrates with Microsoft 365 apps. It can be used to complement the activities in the VLEs:

  • For one-to-one meetings with students, e.g. personal tutoring.
  • For collaborative working and small group activity, including collaborating in real-time on documents, file sharing and chat, e.g. to support Student Group Projects.
  • As a webinar solution for delivering presentations that don’t require the participant and session management controls, or simple polling and breakout group functionality available within Blackboard Collaborate Ultra.
  • In situations where Blackboard Collaborate Ultra is not easily available and MS Teams is, e.g. NHS Grampian computers, which need to be unblocked for Blackboard Collaborate Ultra on a case by case basis
  • If you need to request desktop control, or to be able see more than 5 video streams at once – MS Teams enables you to request desktop control from someone who is sharing their desktop, and you can have up to 49 participants sharing their video at the same time
    • Note: Teams should not be used for preparing pre-recorded lectures or demonstrations of software. Please use the University’s video platform Panopto and embed Panopto videos in MyAberdeen, MyMBChB, or MyBDS.

If you record a webinar delivered through MS Teams and want to make it available to students, please download it from the meeting Chat and upload it to Panopto, ready to embed in MyAberdeen, MyMBChB or MyBDS.